One of the talking-head questions on Libya is whether there’ll be a big bloodbath when the rebels take over. I doubt it. They’ve never been the most warlike people on earth. The last few really ferocious tribes like the Pashtun fight because they don’t know much else or want much else, least of all the malls’n’jobs life. But the Libyans, as far as I can do, do want more malls, more Sinatra hats and ipods, and the sooner the better.

There’ll be a few scores evened up here and there. We’ve seen that already with one of the most interesting little twists in this slo-mo revolution: the killing of Abdel Fattah Younes.

The truth is, it was no surprise Younes got shot. He was an old Qaddafi enforcer who’d made a lot of enemies, and he did one of the most dangerous things a general can do: Change sides in the middle of a civil war.

I found one of the few—real few—decent versions of what happened to Younes on Al Jazeera.

Al Jazeera has been a little weird about NATO in Libya, but when it’s Libyan-on-Libyan stuff, they’re still the best news source. Their story has one of the funniest lines I’ve ever seen: “The chief of the NTC blamed Younes’s killing on gunmen…” Considering Younes was shot multiple times, that’s a pretty solid theory. The question is more which bunch of gunmen did it. At the moment, every redblooded male in Libya is a gunman, so although the Sherlock Holmes of the NTC may be right as far as he went, it still, like reporters loves to say, “leaves many questions unanswered.”

After that, Al J gets down to more serious business and gives you a multiple choice on whodunit.

It Was General Hifter! In the Conservatory! With A Candlestick!

Theory #1: Younes was killed by his main rival for military power in the rebel forces, Hifter. (God, don’t misspell that name.) Hifter was in exile for more than 20 years, which gives him street cred with the rebels. Younes only switched sides during the big battle for Benghazi, and there were rumors that he let important Qaddafi aides escape before he came over.

Hifter was way more popular with the insurgents on the front lines, but Younes seemed to be winning the battle for command. It’s possible Hifter decided to deal with Younes the ol’ Stalin way: “No man, no problem.”

Theory #2: Some freelancer killed Younes for the million-dollar bounty Qaddafi’d put on his head. This one I just plain doubt. If all the men Qaddafi had put a bounty on the heads of were stretched end to end, they’d probably stand up and say, “Why do you have to keep lying down? I’ve got sand in my shoes,” because Qaddafi was long on promises but very short on paying up when it came to death threats, so his wanted list is mostly going to die of old age. Nobody liked Qaddafi much, so nobody was going to kill on command for him out of loyalty; and as for the money, he was less likely than ever to pay up in the middle of an uprising.

Theory #3: Younes was killed in the middle of an argument in the rebels’ ruling council. This one’s possible. Room full of angry people yelling, every single one packing, easy to imagine that yo’mama stuff started flying around and somebody’d seen too many Samuel L. Jackson movies. Or maybe it was more cold-blooded, somebody who wanted Younes out of the way decided the safest time was at the meeting, with Younes’s most loyal bodyguards maybe locked out of the room. It’s happened before. That’s how Beria died. They were so scared of him they just decided to shoot him in his big Politburo chair before he could put everybody who was even thinking bad thoughts about him down in the cellars on Lubyanka for a little Q&A.

Theory #4: He actually was killed during an interrogation, after being called back to HQ when the rebels’ assault west from Benghazi stalled out. Or after the interrogation, when he confessed to being a double agent. I kind of doubt this one too. The NTC has been real obedient to the French, British and Qatar liaison officers who’ve been running the show behind the scenes and they just don’t seem like the kind of people to do an un-telegenic killing like this, right when it’d feed into the worst neocon scary hints about “Islamic militants” taking over.

Theory #5: Islamic militants killed Younes because he wasn’t fanatical enough for them. This one makes me laugh. First of all, if the neocons told us that water flows downhill, I’d expect to see Yosemite Falls doing a U-turn and zooming back up the cliff. They do dead wrong better than a compulsive roulette addict. Besides, nobody talked more Islamic shit than Qaddafi. He only turned anti-jihad because he was slutting around in his usual desperate way, this time looking for Western help, or at least a way to stop NATO from helping the rebels.

The only problem with this Al Jazeera story is that it leaves out what looks to me like the most obvious set of suspects: The surviving relatives of some guy or guys Younes had “liquidated” (Qaddafi liked that word, some retro-Bolshevik thing) on Qaddafi’s orders. There have to be a whole lot of candidates in that pool of suspects, because Younes had been with Qaddafi all the way, since 1969, which wasn’t the summer of love in Libya by a long shot, or volley. That was the date of Qaddafi’s coup, and Younes was one of the OC’s (Original Coupsters).

What makes it even more likely, to me anyway, that Younes was done in by a grudge-holding cousin was that for most of that time, Younes had been running Big Q’s “special forces.” That means the kidnap, torture and assassination squads. You make a lot of enemies that way. Younes was in charge of a force stationed near Benghazi, where the revolution started. This unit was rumored to be anti-Qaddafi, but if they were, it was only in private. A unit located in the hard core of the opposition has to kill a lot of people just to keep drawing their paychecks and stay out of Big Q’s prisons, so you know that Younes had a lot of Eastern Libyan blood on his hands. It was a westie-eastie thing, like if those West-Coast guys got Biggie, maybe they got Younes too!

Some cultures forget who killed their uncles and grandpas easy; some never forget. Take Russians: One of the things that still shocks me is that after the Soviets fell you didn’t hear one story about people tracking down the retired NKVD/MVD goons who shot their relatives. I don’t know why not, but it never seemed to happen.

But Russians ain’t Arabs. Arabs remember. In fact, it’s a moral obligation to kill the guy who shot your cousin or your uncle. In some places in the ME, the only thing that makes people take a second to think before they pull the trigger is trying to remember your family tree, how many relatives of military age you’ve got. The more they can recall, the longer your life expectancy.

So my guess is that somebody from around Benghazi got tired of seeing the man who shot Uncle Rashid playing the brave rebel and talked it over with his bros and cuzzes, and they took care of family business themselves. But it’s only a guess, for now. The truth is, the life span of a general who changes sides in the middle of a civil war is just not that long, no matter where you are.

Not only do you have to deal with grudge-holding relatives of some of the people you placed in mass graves, but the bigger problem of why your new friends should trust you in the first place. You changed sides once; who’s to say you won’t do it twice?

It’s only natural to have your doubts about a man who was fighting against you a few months ago. He could be a double agent, or just a sleaze who’ll jump whichever way the wind’s blowing, a born traitor—as they used to call those types before we got psychologized and started throwing “psychopath” around.

Genghis himself was no big fan of people who changed sides, even when they volunteered to sign up with him. When he took Samarkand, all the Turkish mercs who’d been fighting for the city offered to switch to the Mongol team. He had them all killed: “Great! Glad to have you! We think you’ll enjoy your time with Mongol Hordes Inc.! First, of course, there’s a little initiation to go through, be over in a sec—just kneel down, eyes closed and neck stretched out, that’s it! Stretch that neck! Good, good! Hold still!”

And it’s worst of all for a commander who changes sides when he doesn’t seem to want to win for his new team. That naturally gets people thinking he’s actually still backing his old friends. Younes was in that spot, and it’s not a comfy one. The Libyan rebels put him in charge of military operations—on account of he actually knew something about them. But the rebels weren’t doing well at all. Five months in, they were stalemated on the coast, where everybody expected them to win.

Any Friend of McClellan’s…Shoot’im!

You don’t have to look far for examples close to home about what happens to a man like that. Take the court-martial of McClellan’s favorite officer, Fitz John Porter, in 1862. Porter was a New Englander, but he’d buddy’d up with Lee and other Dixiecrats at West Point and belonged to the southern sympathizers who clustered around McClellan. He was also a big McClellan fan, so when John Pope took over from McClellan, Porter started undermining the new commander every way he could.

The kink in the story here is that Porter was dead right on that issue. Pope was about the only Union officer who could make McClellan look good, which he proceeded to do by managing Second Bull Run so lousily that if it hadn’t been for Porter disobeying Pope’s orders, and a great last stand by George Sykes, the whole Army of the Potomac might have been crushed.

Porter’s real crime came a little later at Antietam, where he commanded the reserve. He supposedly said to McClellan just when the great Mustachio’d Waffler was about to commit the reserves to an attack, “Remember, General, I command the last reserve of the last army of the Republic.” If he really said that—and if McClellan really was considering committing his reserve, which I find hard to believe—then Porter came close to treason right then, because they could have destroyed Lee if they’d pushed on right then.

But that’s not why Porter was court-martialed. Pope was fired and reassigned to Minnesota—on account of Alaska wasn’t part of the Union yet, so that was about as far as they could send him—but the old fool had friends in DC, and he started writing them about how it was Porter’s fault he’d lost, because Porter had disobeyed his orders in Second Bull Run. Which was true, but Porter deserved a medal for doing it.

So they court-martialed him in the winter of 1862-63, found him guilty and booted him. It was right after Fredericksburg, people were in a bad mood. And they were right; the high command was totally incompetent, but it was typical of the way these things play out that they nailed Porter for one of his better decisions, not for what he did at Antietam. They should have just taken McClellan out behind the nearest barn and accidentally shot him a few times, but the rank and file loved him so that was out.

By the way, let’s play a little trivia game here: Which American general does our current prez remind you of? Hint: Came into the job on a huge wave of confidence, backed down before an outnumbered enemy, showed more sympathy for the enemy than his own side…

At least Porter was allowed to die in bed. In most places it doesn’t work that way when a general changes sides and loses battles. A whole lot of ranking Tsarist officers joined the Red Army, and the Bolsheviks were happy to use them as long as there were Whites to zap, but after a while Stalin started to wonder about them. Well, Stalin wondered about everybody, probably wondered about his mom, wanted her dug up and waterboarded—but the death-rate for Tsarist officers who put on the red star, like Piatakov, Yakir, Smirnov and Smilga was near 100%. Or maybe Stalin just didn’t like their names; I sure don’t and neither does Spellcheck. I guess that’s how you tell you’re spelling Russian names right: Spellcheck starts screeching at you.

Same thing has happened every time a rebel army takes control. When Saddam attacked Iran, the Mullahs suddenly started visiting dozens of ex-officer’s in the Shah’s army and especially his air force. The new bosses always appeal to the officers’ patriotism and it usually works. Lots of Iranian pilots joined the Islamic AF of Iran. To thank them for their brave decision, the Islamic Republic allowed some of them to go back to their cells in Ervin. The rest got a lead medal in the back of the head.

Sure, Blame the Fat Guy!

Sometimes officers get shot just for not winning. The most famous case was Admiral John Byng, who got the firing squad for losing Minorca to the French. I guess the English were pissed because they knew that about 150 years later, millions of lager louts were going to want cheap Med packages in English-speaking islands and the Admiral had ruined it for them. Byng didn’t really do anything wrong, besides lose a battle, but under those Georges, the penalty for dogging it against the foe was death, just like it was for stealing a loaf of bread or farting at a magistrate. The only reason anybody remembers him is he inspired some Frenchman to come up with one of the great one-liners: “The English execute an admiral every now and then to encourage the others.”

When a commander’s already marked as a turncoat, his only chance is to be so indispensible to his new friends that they can’t afford to kill him right away. And Younes did the one thing that will lower a turncoat’s chances even further: He didn’t win. That made him expendable, and that made him a good candidate for some justice delayed.

The good news is that it didn’t really matter anyway. The Rebels’ eastern/coastal front was stalled with him in charge, and it stayed stalled after he was shot. It was the Berbers in the west who broke the stalemate. Younes’s odds of living another year were close to zero anyway, and let’s face it: After 42 years of running wet work for Qaddafi, he had it coming and then some.

Would you like to know more? Gary Brecher is the author of the War Nerd. Send your comments to gary dot brecher at gmail dot com. Read Gary Brecher’s first ever War Nerd column by clicking here.

My old man, the Doc, a survivor of Corsicana, TX in the mid-1930’s, said the best place in the U.S. to off one’s fellow man was/is Navarro County. “Where else,” he asked, “could a stiff be found with six (6, count ’em!) 30-30 slugs in his dome and the M.E. ruled it suicide?” Years later, Larry Beria volunteered to test a tap, or two, from one of Makarov’s finest. And now, in the Third (Last?) Millenium, Abby Younes deserves a few posthumous props for having jumped in front of 100 155mm howitzers, all firing at once from Li’l Abdullah’s tricked-out Toyota Tacoma, in hopes of jacking Al-Jazeera’s ratings.

I wish I could remember all the sources from the top of my head, but I do believe you got the islamist killing version wrong. They didn’t supposedly kill him because he wasn’t fanatical enough, that’s a lame excuse. Supposedly they killed him to get revenge for some very, very messy operation in Derna in which Younis participated earlier, where he was crushing islamist militants. That one was meant to happen in the 90s.

Basically, the islamist version is pretty much the revenge killing version that you yourself have brought up.

It makes sense to me, because it’s not that hard to imagine some retard using an opportunity to get his revenge. Younis was called back to Benghazi for questioning over some battle related stuff. Then according to narrative of his comrades some weird strange guys show up and tell him to hop in a car and drive with them to Benghazi to get this over with.

Here’s where it gets suspicious, because supposedly the general’s comrades pleaded with him not to go, and he was just too naïve and went with the weird guys anyway. It’s hard imagining a guy willing to switch sides in a civil war being “too naïve,” he didn’t switch sides until he was in Benghazi surrounded by hostile natives, but the NTC had good integrity credit back then and the whole rebel operation ran on promises and fragile trust, so maybe he did decide to roll along with it just because.

Anyhow, when he rolled out, they supposedly killed him in the middle of a desert with his bodyguards and drove away.

It sounds quite plausible. The NTC sends Feb 17th brigade to arrest the general, general rolls with it because that’s how things work, nobody realises 17th Feb brigade has people in it who had their relatives killed in Dernah, general finds out when he’s full of bullets.

6. Warlord | August 29th, 2011 at 2:22 am

“When the death sentence was passed, according to Moskalenko’s later account,[citation needed] Beria pleaded on his knees for mercy[26] before collapsing to the floor and wailing and crying energetically, but to no avail: the other six defendants were executed by firing squad on 23 December 1953, the same day as the trial [27], while Beria was fatally shot through the forehead by General Batitsky after the latter stuffed a rag into Beria’s mouth to silence his bawling.” From Wikipedia

7. Punjabi From Karachi | August 29th, 2011 at 2:48 am

As I was reading this, I kind of realised that you guys may have been spelling it right, but you’re giving a mispronounciation of the name. It’s pronounced (and spelled) Younus. Writing it as its pronounced, it’s General Abdul Fateh Younus.

This was a nice write through on the post Libya scenario, good analogies with the US Civil War (the minor campaigns are a bit arcane for foreigners to follow, but we’ll try) and a generally fruitful attempt to keep neo-con word farts from fogging up the atmosphere.

It was the part about Beria that really pricked my attention. I also thought/still do, that he was thrown into a show trial, then executed in the proper (but fast and for good measure parnoiacally hurried) Soviet fashion. There is controversy surrounding it, but I doubt he was shot sitting in his chair.

Anyhow, that was all that piqued my attention. Beyond that, a few details:

The last few really ferocious tribes like the Pashtun

Eh debateable. They’re good, but I worry that between the US military and the Pakistani one, they’re getting a multigenerational long workover into softiness.

fight because they don’t know much else or want much else

Again debateable. You fuckers should do a blogpost on the Afghan elite of the 1970’s, real materialist motherfuckers who sucked the Soviet Union in, and started this whole she-bang. They claimed Marx but their two main factions had an ethnic divide thing going on, Tajiks Vs Pashtun, etc. Self destructed, the bastards did, and sucked Pakistan (where do you think 6 million refugees went?) and the USSR into it.

least of all the malls’n’jobs life

Even I agree halfway with this. Malls’n’job on the side are fun, but there is more to life than constantly working, unless of course it’s something that pays a goodly amount of money. Otherwise, don’t waste your labour and go pick up a book. Or if you’re in the United States, leave.

8. Michal | August 29th, 2011 at 3:15 am

PS: When I said maybe he decided to “roll with it” as in, with the guys who shot him later on. Sorry to mix that up with the flashback to february.

Ohio back in the day, sounds like my Pakistan right now. A little far away to have some wild in it, just enough “uncivilised” (or as it’s locally called “uneducated”) behaviour to keep people on their toes but still connected to the seats of power.

10. Zhu Bajie | August 29th, 2011 at 4:13 am

I believe Admiral Byng’s relatives are still trying to get him pardoned.

Hifter, as a 20 year guest of the CIA while living beside Langley in the United States, wanted to make sure he would be able to balkanize Libya in the style desired by Hifter’s American overlords.

13. rick | August 29th, 2011 at 8:15 am

WN is being figurative about Beria, I think.

Beria’s execution is a fascinating story, though. He was slated to supplant dead Stalin. Beria was then personally arrested by General Zhukov at a meeting with everyone present. Interestingly the conspirators had the intuition only the hero of the war had the moral authority to arrest the presumed next leader.

Where WN might be wrongish, I don’t know how scared the others were. Beria wasn’t going to kill anybody, in actuality–everybody knew how crazy that Stalin “liquidation” stuff was. I got the impression everybody high-ranking just knew what a sick fuck Beria was (torturing people in his glory days, raping abducted women), and found it repugnant. I suppose it’s probable they were scared, though. Horrific torture-leading-to-death was Beria’s specialty.

Khruschev seemed like the decentest fellow, and was sort of “elected” because everybody just liked drinking with him? Maybe he seemed least-likely to torture you to death, too–come to think of it, that would probably dominate my political thinking process.

“This actually comes from the novel Children of the Arbat (1987) by Anatoly Rybakov. In his later book The Novel of Memories (In Russian) Rybakov has admitted that he made the quotation up.”

15. mitch | August 29th, 2011 at 10:04 am

As Michal said there’s much more to the islamist option then you’ve mentioned here, you shouldn’t discount it just because some neocons apparantly cry about it. You should read Pepe Escobar’s excellent article about the connection between the Berbers you discussed in your previous article and Al Qaeda, here: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MH30Ak01.html It would greatly aid your analysis, I think you’ll agree.

@ 15. Just to clarify, I wouldn’t go as far as to say “Al Qaeda rules Tripoli” or any of that bullshit, I think Asia Times were a little on the batshit insane side in this conflict, but yeah, the islamist killing version has a bit more to it than just random violence.

That’s the “witness” version anyhow, the witnesses being people from Younis’ unit, but I do think it’s got quite a bit of sense to it.

24. rick | August 29th, 2011 at 8:51 pm

@Sick and Wrong

Dear Batman:

You are a phenomenal organ of idea-articulation, with the pictures of dead people.

I’m not sure how Beria’s execution is contentious in any manner whatsoever.

“Handcuffed and shot” doesn’t mean shit unless scale is established. Like with Beria and NKVD friends, sometimes you have to shoot a handful of people, for the sake of human decency, and cathartic national re-birth.

Beria and Stalin stopped the surge of repressions, started by the March-February Plenum of the CPSU in 1937. The majority of the Plenum voted FOR the repressions. Stalin didn’t have undivided power, it took him a year and a half to stop the massacres. After which, the organizers were tried and executed.

Khrushchev was responsible for providing executions lists for Moscow, which he so gladly did, that he went above his quota, then again above it, then again. Stalin wrote him his famous “stop it, you fool”.

Khrushchev escaped to Kiev just in time to avoid a trial. He killed Beria the moment he could, then falsified documents that Beria was tried. The falsification of the documents has been proven.

Of course you won’t find any of it in English wikipedia, as it was written by ignorant morons like you who know about Soviet history as much as medieval alchemists knew about chemistry. Writing huge articles based on propaganda and books of schizophrenics, and ignoring other renown authors, that’s a fucking talent to do things the wrong way.

There can’t be a bloodbath, man. I mean, Gaddafi’s still in control of Libya, right, and all those fake scenes in Western propaganda machine (apparently also including Al-Jazeera) are actually from Qatar…?

28. CB | August 30th, 2011 at 8:39 am

But, but, Sick and Wrong, I thought none of that was really happening and Qadaffi was still in control! It was all a fake done on a set in Qatar, remember? So those men aren’t dead, they’re actors with some stage blood on them.

But wait, why would the lying propaganda outlets of CNN and Al Jazeera act out and then report on the rebels killing African migrant workers? That kinda goes against the narrative they were crafting, doesn’t it? Did they forget?

You’ll have to explain this to me, since you and reality are best buds, maybe you can as kit why it seems to be jumping around so much ignoring causality.

Then NATO openly attacked Tripoli from the sea. What do you think happens when a city is ambushed by western special ops? You fucking morons. Then even stopped denying their involvement, breaching the 1973 UN resolution.

30. NN | August 30th, 2011 at 1:21 pm

Sick and Wrong,

Please forgive me but I was wrong. Last week I gave you the advice to cry harder when no one listens. But what I meant to say was remove yourself from the gene pool, thanks in advance.

31. super390 | August 30th, 2011 at 4:08 pm

@29:

And NATO invaded a city of 2 million loyal Gadafites from the sea and afterwards no one remembers seeing any white guys wearing life vests or scuba gear! How many guys did it take MacArthur at Inchon? Ask War Nerd why the Western militaries spend tons on amphibious warfare capabilities but never use them – they’re scared to death of trying a major landing under fire from all sorts of weapons invented since 1950.

It’s all okay, though, because you’ve answered the biggest question of all by ranting about the smearing of the wise and compassionate Uncle Joe by Western historians. To wit: what sub-fraction of idiot radical would go so far out of his way to be a faghag for Muamar Gadafy when there are so many radicals more deserving of support?

Gadafy is now in the company of Josef Stalin, thanks to you, right next to each other on your Facebook page. If there’s still someone bitter, sociopathic and pathetic enough to claim that Stalin was anything better than the sort who would kill tens of millions to cover up his mistakes and then claim infallibility, then I guess this is where he’d have to end up.

You’re a pathetic apologist. Anyone who doesn’t know that Stalin killed thousands of billions is making a joke of himself. He killed trillions, it is KNOWN!

33. rick | August 30th, 2011 at 9:32 pm

‘Beria and Stalin stopped the surge of repressions, started by the March-February Plenum of the CPSU in 1937. The majority of the Plenum voted FOR the repressions. Stalin didn’t have undivided power, it took him a year and a half to stop the massacres. After which, the organizers were tried and executed.’

Is this some kind of joke Putin-funded commenter Ashton Kutcher shit? It’s pretty retro-Brezhnev. I’ve never read a book claiming Stalin wasn’t personally responsible for the 1937 purge. Where would you even get that? “Wikipedia”? Are you a Russian nationalist?

BERIA stopped NKVD executions out of the goodness of his heart in 1937? What?

This is literally some Chinese guy at a computer getting paid $.07 a comment? I don’t know where else you get this. Who even cares sufficiently to speculate about this?

@ 33 rick, you don’t have to be a fucking detective dipshit to find proof for what I said. You don’t even have to read books. Read the log of the 1937 February-March CC CPSU Plenum. If you can find it in English, that is. Read Politburo logs, messages that Khrushchev sent from Moscow and Kiev to Politburo, asking to raise his quota from 2000 executions/month to 16000, three times.

If you want books, read these western historians, I give you western ones cause you’re gonna say my russian historians are liars and shit, right? So read these authors – Arch Getty (USA), Robert Davies (UK), Stephen Wheatcroft (Australia), Gabor T. Rittersporn (France). They base their findings on actual documents and not on Cold War propaganda and speculations.

Cold War was not something to take lightly, you can’t deny that USA threw in everything they could. Sure, USSR did propaganda as well, but it was contained in USSR. USA however sponsored authors across the WORLD to write anti-soviet books, and as a consequence of that, we now have the “40-100 million repressed” figure generally accepted. Unfortunately they forgot to mention this was bullshit after the war ended…

The first figure “10 million” appeared for the first time when Churchill asked Stalin about the number of people that died from a drought, Stalin raised his both hands to say “no comments”, but Churchill interpreted the move as “10 million”, which he then gladly announced to everyone like “Stalin told him that himself”…

36. fnord | August 31st, 2011 at 10:19 am

Umm, from what I hear of the SF angle, the main outside job was done bu the Quatari and Jordanian SF with a little lovin help from the brits and french “advisors”. So technicaly it was a arab league op, gives NATO deniability.

37. rick | August 31st, 2011 at 7:16 pm

@sick and wrong

I agree those “100,000,000” numbers are total bullshit. You’re at 644,000 “shot in the head” in 1937. Mostly communist party members. Unknown millions (?) in the early-30s Ukraine famine.

Stalin and Beria working together like Nancy Drew to stop the purges? I don’t know where you got that. I’ll admit western propagandists capable of shilling “20,000,000!!! DEAD!!!” bullshit perpetually might misrepresent facts.

“By the way, let’s play a little trivia game here: Which American general does our current prez remind you of? Hint: Came into the job on a huge wave of confidence, backed down before an outnumbered enemy, showed more sympathy for the enemy than his own side…”

That’s a spot-on summation of Obama: He’s McClellan.

Meanwhile, the Republican ranks are chock-full of Jeb Stuarts and Stonewall Jacksons and even a couple Shermans and Grants. They don’t give a rip — they’ll gladly burn the country down to get what they want, and they’ll happily take advantage of Obama/McClellan’s determination to play only by their rules.

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